We’re going to be recapping the SEOs & DEVs video published yesterday on YouTube with guest Michael King from iPullRank. URL to watch: https://youtu.be/Lp2wAqWeOgw
Checklists, beginner SEOs, and tools:
From a developer’s point of view, it seems like a lot of times with SEOs that we’ve got this fire drill mentality and sometimes a single thing can seem like it’s the absolute most important thing to one SEO but not to another.
Mike goes on to talk about that often it’s a tool saying something is so important, and that becomes the focus. Or that someone may not have the technical knowledge to know how to prioritize tasks.
Furthering the conversation – why do the tools push out a 30 page report?
And this comes down to reports and tools that don’t know the context of your site.
And I think we’ve all been in this situation, where a client or someone gets sent a report on their site by a tool and it says you are doing all these things wrong, but they don’t know the backstory as to why we aren’t doing that. Sometimes that’s a technical limitation, or maybe the CEO said they want a specific phrase in the title and you or obligated at some point to go with that.
Our job is to interpret that through the frame of what the business actually needs to do
Why context matters for automation:
A lot of SEO can be automated, but you really need human interpretation to ensure that it doesn’t go overboard.
The up-to-date, the out-of-date and the myths:
Things like text to code ratio and W3C compliance. They’re out of date, with no backing, and the tools still show them. Haven’t gone back and taken a critical look at what is really needed. It’s just about feature parity from other tools.
Any my take on this is that a lot of tools look for things that they can measure empirically, so they can assign some kind of number and is tangible. User experience isn’t bounce rate, but bounce rate is an easy number to get so it’s used.
Documentation drift & Doing your own research:
Google’s documentation may be out of phase and the pagination rel previous next was brought up as an example of discussing how Google should even handle it.
But do you really think Google is actually documenting enough? Probably not, and they’ll never reveal enough for anyone to take advantage of the algorithm.
The audience challenge:
The documentation is often positioned to the middle, between engineers and SEOs.
Google relaunched their dev documentation site about a year ago, as they realized they needed to group it differently, but they still get beginners commenting and having issues on things that are highly technical and not something they really should be doing if they aren’t SEOs or Devs.
Give us feedback:
They actually read the feedback. A lot is constructive and helpful, and of course not everyone has nice things to say. Mike talks about how a lot of what they speculated about how the crawler interpreted JavaScript was then documented by Google later. That insight and information was incredibly valuable in shedding light on how they needed to be thinking about things.
Sometimes the documentation is vague and it actually causes more problems for SEOs.
Why docs sometimes create misunderstandings:
There’s even tools that have different scores after different runs and that is due to things like network conditions. The documentation on the tools themselves don’t do a good job of explaining that. Things like sessions vs clicks in GSC, and how those are different are really not documented, so it makes it hard as an SEO.
Getting past “us vs them” together:
We all come from such varying backgrounds as SEOs and learning to work with the engineers in a more effective manner by understanding what they do and see from their perspective.
How to support each other:
Making sure that its understood when working with engineers that everyone did the best they could on this, and we’re as SEOs only looking at this from a different perspective. With that in mind, understanding what an engineer needs to accomplish the task from documentation so it can be properly prioritized.
Let’s test this together, let’s research this together, would be a great approach to solving SEO problems.
When you are a consultant, it’s a lot harder though, you are expected to know everything.
Ask questions, get help to clarify things.
Summary:
SEOs should value the different perspective of different people and be receptive to do their own research, and developers need to be more trusting towards SEOs and take them on the journey with them to figure things out together. That would make things a lot easier.
Mike sums it up well: “No SEO is trying to ruin your website.They just want to help its visibility, drive traffic, and ultimately driving conversions.”
So, remember it’s a collaboration.
